Précis 5

Nate Ward

11/18/14

Paul Woodruff provides an overview of sophist thought and works to deflate

Plato’s criticism of Protagoras and Gorgias, thus placing them, and the other sophists, on

more level footing with the other pre-Socratic philosophers.1 Towards this end, Woodruff

teases out two key sophistic concepts from the extant writings of Gorgias and Protagoras,

Eikos and Eubolia, and frames much of his discussion around said concepts. Eikos is

essentially appealing to what is reasonable to expect in a given situation, and eubolia is

the exercise of good judgment required to determine what is and is not reasonable in a

given situation (p. 297-298). The sophists taught reasoning based upon the combination

of these concepts.

Woodruff provides an informative outline of Plato’s negative criticisms of the

sophists (p. 290-291). Plato thought it ludicrous that any two arguments could be equally

correct; he (incorrectly) inferred that the sophists thought eikos identical to truth, but

Woodruff claims that eikos only amounts to “an admittedly risky method for exploring

the truth when the available evidence will not support ascertainable conclusions”; it is not

a replacement of truth (p. 296). Reasoning based upon eikos depends upon the “good

judgment and experience of those who use it”, as well as “the relevance of the

information that frames it”, in essence what is reasonable, i.e. eikos, is relative to

1 Woodruff, Paul. "Rhetoric and Relativism: Protagoras and Gorgias." The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. By A. A. Long. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 290-310. Print.

background information changing, hence eubolia, i.e. good judgment, is required (p. 297-

298).

Woodruff argues that sophistic thought was grounded upon a naturalistic

methodology and is not radically relativistic (save Protagoras, perhaps) or skeptical.

Woodruff asserts that nature is correlated with knowledge similar to how convention is

correlated with opinion, and he argues that since nature is uniform (in that all humans

experience it) any appeals rooted in nature defy relativism automatically; it also neatly

avoids skepticism (p. 304). Woodruff asserts that one of the defining features of sophistic

thought “is their commitment to human nature as a subject of study” (p. 305). For the

sophists, nature enables humans to “maintain reasonable expectations towards and of one

another”; in essence, nature is what grounds eikos and eubolia (p. 309).

Woodruff reiterates Plato’s belief that the sophists were not experts; they had

“little more than the ability to mimic experts” (p. 307). Woodruff sketches two responses

to this, noting that “if they are coherent in thought and practice, then they must believe

they could be teachers without having knowledge”, (p. 307). Woodruff argues that a

“Gorgian answer” would be that his aim was not to teach anything specific; it was only to

teach the nonspecific practice of rhetoric (p. 307-308). Woodruff points out that all

Protagoras claims to teach is “the good sense to ask pertinent questions and recognize

relevant information”, which is to say that eikos does not require any special knowledge

of a given matter, only eubolia. Hence, Protagoras is a teacher insofar as he teaches how

to sharpen ones judgment, he need not teach any specialized information to be a teacher

(p. 308-309).